Kyle MacLachlan slips into familiar skin with his return to ‘Twin Peaks’ but adds in a few new layers
There had been many rumors over the years that David Lynch and Mark Frost’s landmark television series “Twin Peaks” would return in some form. Even though Lynch had been quoted as definitively saying the series was as good as done, that didn’t stop speculation regarding a comeback of some kind. So whenever Kyle MacLachlan, who played quirky FBI Agent Dale Cooper on the original program, got wind of a rumor he’d simply ask his good friend Lynch about it, who would insist that none of it was true.
“I would ask him if he had any thought or inkling or an idea about going back to ‘Twin Peaks’ or trying,” MacLachlan says by phone from New York. “Basically, it was me attempting to see if he would let me go back and revisit Cooper again in some way because I loved that character so much.”
Unbeknownst to MacLachlan, Lynch and Frost did actually start talking about ideas and latched on to some that they put to paper. That prompted a sit-down meeting at which Lynch asked MacLachlan if this was something he “really wanted to do.” There was no hesitation from his “Blue Velvet” star, but Lynch did tell him cryptically that there would be some “other stuff” he’d need to do if a revised series went forward.
I’m pretty much like all the fans. I would always like to see more, but whether that’s going to happen or not I just don’t know.
— Kyle MacLachlan
He wasn’t kidding. When MacLachlan eventually sat down in a secure location to read the 500 or so page script, he discovered not only was he playing Agent Cooper again, but also Mr. C., an evil doppelgänger of the field agent, and Dougie, a Las Vegas man whose body Cooper inhabits after escaping from the alternate dimension of the Black Lodge and returning to this plane of existence.
Yes, it’s a lot to take in, even if you watched the original run of the show. But it was all part of a new, unexpected direction for the series that MacLachlan was enthusiastic about.
“In a way, it feels like a new incarnation of what was ‘Twin Peaks’ or a different realization of it,” MacLachlan says. “When they announced the return, the intent was never to go back and try to re-create something. I know David and Mark were much more keen on a new story, new direction, which they did and, I think, is kind of extraordinary.”
While stepping back into the fitted, black suit of Agent Cooper was comfortably familiar (“still kind of the same Cooper, but he’s a little older”), MacLachlan had the most fun playing Mr. C, the antithesis of almost every character he’s portrayed over a three-decade-long career.
And the hardest? That would be the scenes as Dougie.
Upon his return from the Black Lodge, the show’s storyline finds Agent Cooper taking over Dougie’s body rather than that of his doppelgänger, Mr. C., as he intended. That leaves the altered Dougie in an almost catatonic, child-like state for much of the season.
“There wasn’t much dialogue, and the reaction time for Dougie was slowed down, so everything took longer. I found that element alone to be really challenging,” MacLachlan says. “You also have to really trust that you have a strong inner life and that you are processing everything that’s happening around you; you just happen to be processing it with a really slow computer. That little shuffle, the look, and there was a lot of thinking about what a newborn, or what a baby is able to respond to, react to and take in and try to make sense of and to gradually learn those patterns.”
As with the series’ original run and the stand-alone prequel film, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” there are a number of different interpretations viewers can take from the final episode and, more important, the final few scenes. MacLachlan understands those varied reactions but believes Lynch knew exactly what he was doing and wanted to say.
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“We shot [the end] fairly early in the whole process. That was while we were up in Seattle, which was the first five or six weeks of the filming,” MacLachlan says. “David was very specific with me about how he wanted the physicalization of the last few moments to go. He had seen it in his head, imagined it, and I was very much in the dark as to what was meant to have happened. It felt to me at the time that there was a shattering of a belief system in Cooper.”
The final product earned raves from fans and critics alike and found MacLachlan with his first Golden Globe nomination since he won the lead actor in a drama series in 1991. As for hopes that this isn’t the end of “Twin Peaks,” MacLachlan is keeping the door open, but only a smidge.
“I’m pretty much like all the fans. I would always like to see more, but whether that’s going to happen or not I just don’t know,” the actor says.
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